Volume 98 | Number 3 | May-June 2010

A review of What Darwin Got Wrong, by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini. Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini misunderstand the history of evolutionary biology, says Richards, and they draw the evidence for their arguments against natural selection from scientists whom they believe to be confused about the fundamental mechanisms of evolution

A review of A Nuclear Winter's Tale: Science and Politics in the 1980s, by Lawrence Badash. In this intricately detailed history, Badash examines both the scientific origins of the concept of nuclear winter and the debate over its relevance to nuclear policy and the Cold War arms race

A review of Science as a Contacts Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth’s Climate, by Stephen H. Schneider; Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity, by James Hansen; and Climate Cover-up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming, by James Hoggan with Richard Littlemore. Schneider, Hansen and Hoggan all say that their efforts to communicate the urgency of the problem of climate change to policy makers and the general public have met with powerful resistance. The consequences, Zenghelis warns, could be tragic

A review of The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, by Richard Holmes. This is a wonderfully engaging narrative, says Gregory; Holmes’s biographical storytelling shows the impact of science on the hearts as well as the minds of Humphry Davy, Joseph Banks, Mungo Park, and William and Caroline Herschel

A review of The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence, by Paul Davies. We’ve been searching for extraterrestrial intelligence for 50 years now but haven’t found it. Could it be the case that civilizations inevitably destroy themselves before they evolve to the point of being able to colonize the galaxy?

A review of First Peoples in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age America, by David J. Meltzer. When did the first humans arrive in the Americas? What route—or routes—did they take? Was there more than one wave of settlers? What did they do when they got here? Meltzer explains why archaeology has not yet been able to provide very precise answers to such questions

A review of A Brilliant Darkness: The Extraordinary Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Ettore Majorana, the Troubled Genius of the Nuclear Age, by João Magueijo. In addition to examining theories about what became of Majorana when he disappeared permanently in 1938, Magueijo explains why Majorana’s ideas about the neutrino are once again on the minds of physicists, now that evidence has begun to accumulate that the elusive neutrino has some tiny but nonzero mass

A review of Isaac Newton on Mathematical Certainty and Method, by Niccolò Guicciardini. Guicciardini reconstructs Newton’s mathematics and his conception of mathematical methodology. Convinced that only geometrical proofs can be considered certain, Newton favored using geometrical techniques to inject certainty into natural philosophy; he was an antimodernist in that he considered the techniques of the ancients to be a paradigm of correct methodology